Poems by Hartley Coleridge :: :: University of Virginia Library

Oh sweet new-comer to the changeful earth!
If, as some darkling seers have boldly guessed,
Thou hadst a being and a human birth,
And wert erewhile by human parents blest,
Long, long before thy present mother pressed
Thee, helpless stranger, to her fostering breast;
Then well it is for thee that thou canst not
Remember aught of face, or thing, or spot,
But all thy former life is clean forgot:
For sad it were to visit earth again,
And find it false, and turbulent, and vain;
So little better than it was of yore,
Yet nothing find that thou hast loved before;
And restless man in haste to banish thence
The very shadow of old reverence.
But well for us that there is something yet,
Which change cannot efface, nor time forget;—

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The patient smile of passive babyhood,
The brook-like gurglings, murmuring after meaning,
The waking dream, the shade as softly screening
The innocent sweetness of the opening bud,
Which future love and sager thought encloses,
As dewy moss, that swathes the swelling roses,
Till thought peers forth, and murmurs break to words,
With human import in the notes of birds.
And thus sweet maid! thy voice, so blithe and clear,
Pours all the spring on thy good grandsire's ear,
Filling his kind heart with a new delight,
Which Homer may in ancient days have known,
Till love and joy create an inward sight,
And blindness shapes a fair world of its own.
Let mutability, then, work its will,
The child shall be the same sweet creature still.